"He dreams of the day when the spell of the bestseller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered." Enrique Vila-Matas

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

The Irony of Light

Treading Lightly by Jacques Réda

In reference to his
1975collection of poems, La tourne (the second of three
collections included in this volume), Jacques Réda speaks of “the poet in search
of the town as mandala.” An exotic analogy, surely, it is also a fitting one, as over the years he
has written poem after poem inspired if not preoccupied by his own experience of
wandering the streets of his beloved city, Paris, with camera and notebook in
hand, every day the adventurer, every bit the citadin, every bit the poet-flâneur. Yet his range is wider than
that, touching, if lightly, on history and politics, and on language—poetry—itself.
A devotee and veteran writer on jazz, his poetry tends to the musical, the
spontaneous, the improvisational. Writes Aaron Prevost in his essay ‘Poetry,
Swing and Jacques Réda,’ “One of the great pleasures of reading French writer
Jacques Réda’s work is the buoyant élan
poétique that coexists with his sense of melancholy and lightens it. Réda
draws much of his inspiration for integrating this pulse into his work from
jazz.”

Paul Auster, in his
introduction to The Random House Book of
Twentieth Century French Poetry, asserts that, in contrast to English
writing, “French literary language has largely been a language of essences.” Indeed,
unlike his predecessor, the radical poet and enfant terrible, Tristan Tzara, who’d hated the ordinary in
language and vision, Réda clearly revels in it, makes of it something essential, extraordinary, sublime. He
is, according to scholar John Taylor, “a dauntless explorer of the overlooked thing.”

Here, for your enjoyment,
are a few of my favorite samples:

Rue Rousselet

They say
the road with its old wall goes running off.

So it
does, a few steps past the corner, then all grows still,

And the
old wall becomes its own reflection in water

From long
ago; and would you, if you walked on, change

your life

Or your
soul before reaching the opposite corner, which

sails

By some
other time, under the slow delicate light

Of leaves
in a garden fenced around memories?

We saw

The key
one day shining between forgotten books, fingers,

Clouds;
all the rays of evening are looking for it

In the
enigmatic symmetry of balconies

Where the
sky leans over uncertain, waiting for a shadow;

—Slant
against the road’s fleeting loveliness,

already
it’s slipping slantwise through our hearts.

October Morning

Lev
Davidovitch Bronstein ruffles his goatee, hands

restless,

Ruffles
his shaggy hair; in a moment he’ll

Leap out
of his waistcoat and lose his scholar’s spectacles,

This
figure addressing Krondstadt sailors hewn from the

rough

Timber or
Finland and with scarcely less feeling

Than the
rifle butts that let fly dirty snow.

He
preaches, Lev Davidovitch, he talks himself hoarse

While

Over the
leaden Neva the cruiser Aurora slowly

Turns its
turret towards the dim façade

Of the
Winter Palace.

What a
performer; what a yellow sky;

What a
weight of history on the empty bridges where the

Odd car

Rumbles,
its wings bristling with bayonets.

Tonight,
at Smolny, beards have grown; seared

By
tobacco and filament bulbs, eyes

Roll,
Petrograd, before you twilight, your silence

Where out
there, in an earnest crowd of grim-faced

Latvians,

Lev
Davidovitch prophesies, exhorts, threatens, trembles

Too as he
feels the inert mass of centuries

Tilt
irreversibly, like canons on their axles

At the
edge of this October morning.

(And already Vladimir

Ilitch is
secretly back in the capital; later

He’ll
sleep, with the same dotard’s make-up, in a glass

coffin

Forever
unmoving below the bouquets and fanfares.

Meanwhile
Lev Davidovitch shake his shock of hair,

Retrieves
his eyeglasses,

—where a
little blood, a little Mexican

Sky will
mingle on the last day, so far

From you,
muddy October, raving in the flurry of red

flags.)

Afternoon

Afternoon’s
pale clarity above roofs of blue and rose.

The bell
is about to strike; you want to sleep, like the tree

At the
corner of the street when never a soul goes by.

But the
orb of insomnia stands there, strident

As a
cockerel in a deserted courtyard,

Between
the shaft whose polished wood dares not shine.

And
everything, even the blameless birds that’s fallen silent,

Shivers
in the humbled poverty of appearances.

Sleep, or
death, better your shadow than this infinite

Unveiling
of dreams laid bare to the irony of light,

Than eyes
than no longer have lids and can’t deny

This
emptiness growing all of a sudden when the clock

strikes two.

Jacques Réda, born in 1929, is the was awarded
the French Academy’s Grand Prix in 1993 for a lifetime’s work. Aside from
innumerable articles and essays on jazz, he is the author of numerous volumes
of poetry, as well as works of fiction (including a novel) and non-fiction,
perhaps the best known of which is his 1977 Les
ruines de Paris.

George Ovitt and Peter Adam Nash

George Ovitt is the author of The Restoration of Perfection; The Snow Man, a collection of short stories, and Splitting the Difference, a collection of poems.
Peter Nash is the author of a recently completed novel called Parsimony, as well as of a biography on the life and times of the turn-of-the-century Jewish American sculptor, Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel. He can be reached at nashpeter@mac.com.